We need to have a serious talk about this app and how it is recreating Reddit karma, and how it should not be doing that
Hellos, so, like everyone else here I am a Reddit refugee with a particular and profound hatred for karma, and the idea of it, because I saw how Reddit karma made everything on that hellsite toxic. People's self-worth became tied to it because it was a direct measure of other people's approval of you, and so people did everything possible to maximize their karma, including making bot accounts that karma farmed and sold them to marketers. People would fly into a rage and refuse to listen to each other simply because their comments were getting downvoted, making civil debate impossible and causing destabilization everywhere. Reddit karma is double plus ungood.
From what I understand, Wefwef has a similar feature where it shows your total post and comment scores. That's basically Reddit karma, and it needs to go, like now. Even if it's client-side, it doesn't matter, because it is tying a number to people's self-worth and will cause the same toxic, mean-spiritedness, negativity, anger, vitriol, and corporate marketers exploiting the situation like vultures on a corpse that we saw the last time we migrated to a new site.
Please, PLEASE remove the comment and post scores from the app. PLEASE don't let Lemmy fail like the other sites did. PLEASE don't let that kind of hurt be allowed to spread through our communities anymore.
People don't NEED to be rewarded or punished based on other people's opinions of them and their comments or posts. They don't NEED to see that shit. It only causes harm and pain.
PLEASE take it off.
For our sanity's sake. For our people's sake. For decency's sake.
Kinda hilarious that someone downvoted you for saying you don't mind karma; if that person disagreed that karma is okay, why did they downvote you and participate in the system? 🤪
No it doesn't. People already do that on their own; all karma does is encourage all of the toxic shit we ran away from. Why would we shit all over a new community by repeating a senseless and destructive mistake?
if you put any association between upvotes and self worth, on any platform, thats on you (in general, not @ you op). i still thought karma was a fun measurement though, i see no problem it.
reddit hasn't "failed" yet, probably wont, ever. if it ever does, i promise you that karma wasnt the reason.
I obviously don't, but everyone else does, and it's not even something most people can really help. Fucking social media corporations had their marketing departments come up with the stupid idea knowing that people would be addicted to the dopamine hit from being upvoted.
At least on the OG Lemmy site, being upvoted or downvoted doesn't actually affect you. But an app purposefully bringing back something the devs did not implement in the first place for good reasons, is deeply problematic and people need to speak out against the practice.
We have a chance to break the cycles of the past and we ought to take it.
This has very little do to with wefwef and all with the Lemmy backend. The API simply gives out the total post and comment scores of a user. Nothing is done client side here.
And I can promise you, that most apps will display these scores on a user’s profile page sooner or later, simply because it’s easy to do.
So if you really want to abolish karma, then you should argue your case for Lemmy overall and not for a single app.
Apps need to be pressured not to do that, but I agree with you that we need to speak to the Lemmy devs about the situation too. I'll do that too, for now, we must address the fact that Wefwef, the most popular Lemmy app, is displaying karma scores when it really should not be.
gotta say I dislike karma as well, but what a client does clientside is sort of its own business.
its likely that the best easy to keep this "karma" irrelevant is to just ignore both it and the apps that try to quantify it.
having said that, depending on how a client fetches data to calculate things it could be defined as instance load abuse and those clients could be user-agent banned from an instance at the discretion of the instance admins. this really should remain an instance by instance choice though.
🤔 Can instance admins actually stop apps from tabulating karma? How does that work? Do they ban the whole app or stop certain data from being accessible by the API or?
This isn’t specific to wefwef. There are plenty of other apps that do the same, i believe its tied to the actual lemmy api that keeps track of everything.
Ive never been a big fan of karma either, but just having post and comment totals doesn’t really bother me. As long as we as a community don’t glorify it. Even when i was on reddit i never cared about my karma.
Having said that, not everyone is of the same mind set and there will definitely be accounts trying to “farm” points. If one of them posts a lot that it annoys me i can just block them from my feed.
It's not just a problem that can be ignored away. Troll and bot accounts that farm karma will ruin the site just as effectively as they did on Reddit regardless of whether people block them or not -- their presence illegitimizes the site and ruins the atmosphere. No one wants to hang out on a site that is populated with them, they want a site with humans that want to talk to them for their own sake.
Like there are a myriad of reasons people need to be worried about this, and that people are being so flippant about it just because it points out something negative about Wefwef (not saying you are doing that) is deeply concerning.
My main issue with karma and post scores was that it increased social conformity. People became more and more hesitant to voice opinions that went against the Reddit users mainstream, because saying something people disagreed with got immediately “punished” with downvotes.
The downvotes then made the comment less and less visible, which further contributed to the silencing of discussions. I think (polite) discussion is an important part of a platform such as this one. It’s a pity that Reddit’s system discouraged discussion and became more and more a click factory. I hope that we can avoid that here. I agree that it would be a good step to remove the visible upvote/downvote system (or at least the downvotes).
If the majority does not like the concept of karma, they will migrate to a platform that doesn't have it. You will not be doing anything better than a shitty company by forcing something that a large population of consumers doesn't like.
The issue with this kind of decentralisation is that it becomes very difficult to stop someone from doing something a population does not like.
That's what they did here, and this app is bringing back the very same thing people here are trying to leave behind. It's too dangerous to just allow them to do that, and I know for a fact I am not alone in that opinion. Framing something that is objectively destructive in terms of "something a population doesn't like" is sus as fuck. What do you stand to gain from an app doing such a terrible thing?